Many large organizations including businesses and government agencies offer toll-free (e.g., 800 number) telephone calling services for the convenience of their customers or constituents. Telemarketers, airlines, hotels, and travel agencies are examples of business organizations that offer such services. Telemarketers, as the term is used here, refers to inbound telemarketing organizations such as catalogue sales companies or telemarketing bureaus that receive calls via more than one telephone number for more than one sales campaign or client organization. Telemarketers shall serve as the prime example of organizations that might benefit from the present invention.
A telemarketer may establish a telemarketing complex or system that includes telecommunications centers (TCs) established at multiple geographically diverse locations in order to receive calls. Each TC is typically linked to one or more data centers (DCs) in the complex. However, there may be some situations in which data centers are not included in a telemarketing complex. Each TC is equipped with an automatic call distributor (ACD) to receive calls and subsequently distribute those calls among groups of agents or attendants assigned to each location. The attendants generally obtain information needed to respond to a customer or constituent from one of a plurality of DCs that contain what can be described as "customer order fulfillment" information, which for example, may include detailed profiles for specific clients whose calls are being processed, inventory of stock remaining in warehouses, or number of unfilled seats on airplanes. If the telemarketing complex does not include any DCs, the attendants will respond based upon information obtained from the customer or constituent, or from other sources such as books and catalogs. The DCs may be distributed among multiple geographically diverse locations and may be linked to one another. Each DC may contain multiple databases. a traffic control center (TCC) is arranged to monitor and control the volume of call traffic processed by each TC in the complex and to monitor the status of DCs.
Historically, an organization that provides toll-free calling to its customers or clients may have made available a single telephone number through which calling parties could gain access to at least one of a plurality of TCs. In this relatively simple situation, the prevention of call blocking at any ACD and balanced processing of calls at all ACDs have been primary concerns of the organization providing toll-free calling.
A telemarketer operates in a relatively more complex environment, where calls are concurrently received via more than one toll-free telephone number for a variety of telemarketing applications or "campaigns". For example, a telemarketer may manage three campaigns where calls are placed to a first toll-free number, by one group of customers ordering automobile tires from a tire company, calls are placed to a second toll-free number by a second group of customers ordering pet food from a pet food supplier, and calls are placed to a third toll-free number from yet a third group of customers seeking to reserve rooms with a national hotel chain. In some instances, one campaign may require more than one toll-free telephone number. For example, the pet food company could have one telephone number for ordering dog and cat food, a second telephone number to order bird seed, and a third telephone number to order fish food. Also, calls for each campaign may not be received at all locations. In the example given above, the telemarketer may have five locations for receiving calls, with an ACD at each location. However, while hotel reservations may be received at all five locations, orders for pet food may be received at only three locations, and orders for tires may be received at only one location. Note that a telemarketer may receive local exchange and foreign exchange calls in addition to toll-free calling provided by interexchange carriers.
If the telemarketer is conducting more than one campaign, as in the example above, or if, for a single telephone number, calls are partitioned among trunk groups according to the geographical origins of calls or other predetermined criteria, then attendants at each location may be divided into groups and assigned to answer calls (arriving on designated trunk groups) that satisfy the predetermined criteria. Such trunk group/attendant group mappings are referred to as "gates" or "splits". Each attendant who answers calls is assigned to a primary split and may be cross-trained between campaigns for assignment to secondary and tertiary splits.
The ability of a telemarketer to monitor and control telephone network traffic is a major concern that focuses on three areas--namely, the timeliness of information, integration of information from diverse sources, and autonomous decision making. Historically, TCC staff personnel have not been able to capture, process or use real-time data (i.e., data that arrives at the TCC in time to appropriately affect the decision-making process) when making decisions about shifting traffic among ACDs. Instead, TCC staff personnel have had to rely on historic reports that reflected traffic profiles for an earlier period. Thus, TCC staff personnel were expected to assume that the historical reports were indicative of present traffic conditions in the network. Consequently, decisions were made to modify the call processing logic, that reroutes traffic flow in the Public Switched Telecommunications Network (PSTN), based on the dated historical information, moderated by the judgement of TCC staff personnel,
The difficulty of integrating information from diverse sources may be appreciated by considering that a typical traffic control center (TCC) at which changes to the call processing logic (i.e., stored software instructions that specify conditional routing and termination treatments for telephone calls) are formulated, periodically receives and must process status information from all TCs and their resident ACDs as well as customer order fulfillment information that may be contained in any DCs used by the organization. The assembled information must be analyzed by traffic control center personnel in light of both call handling capacity thresholds at the monitored ACDs as well as the status of alternate ACDs to which new excess calls may be directed.
The lack of autonomy in decision making by the TCC staff is of concern because of delays in the implementation of decisions that result. Traffic control center staff personnel must identify an ACD that is overly congested and a candidate ACD that is lightly loaded and thus available to receive additional calls.
The preceding discussion suggests that sophisticated contemporary telemarketers are concerned not only about call blocking at ACDs, as was addressed by several prior art systems described below, but also about other issues not addressed in the prior art, viz.: (1) maintenance of balanced distribution of call traffic across individual telemarketing campaigns; (2) the ability to monitor telemarketer complex performance and implement change in real-time; (3) rapid integration of information from diverse sources such as ACD performance information, TC staffing information, and PSTN call traffic volume and origins; and (4) formulation and implementation of centralized decisions at the TCC. In sum, today's telemarketer is ultimately concerned with maintaining a desired level of service for each campaign where characteristics of individual campaigns may differ greatly. Note that service level is a function of the number of agents available to handle calls, the rate at which calls are received, the time required to serve a calling party, and other factors.
Rather than focusing on maintaining balanced levels of service among ACDs, the prior art has focused primarily on methods that prevent the blocking of calls from the PSTN at any of a plurality of ACDs or methods that result in balanced distribution of calls among a plurality of ACDs where access to the network of ACDs is gained through one toll-free telephone number. U.S. Pat. No. 4,191,860 issued to R. W. Weber on Mar. 4, 1980, allows calls to be allocated to individual ACDs on a fixed percentage basis as specified by the telemarketer. This method does not have the capability to dynamically adapt to variable conditions encountered when load balancing is attempted. Other arrangements have been devised where load balancing is attempted by semiautomatic means.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,611,094 issued to R. L. Asmuth et al. on Sep. 9, 1986, describes a method that allows a telemarketer to customize 800 service call processing logic based on additional call processing instructions obtained from a call originator. While this method may be used to redirect calls among ACDs in response to information provided by call originators, its usefulness as a means of load balancing is dependent upon the ability of the telemarketer to change parameters and re-initiate the customer record program that directs specific announcements to callers. This method is ill prepared to meet a telemarketer's need to modify call processing logic in order to accomplish real-time load balancing.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,737,983 issued to J. C. Frauenthal et al. on Apr. 12, 1988, describes a method for balancing 800 telephone service call loads based on the state of traffic congestion at each of the multiple locations receiving calls. A switching office receiving a call destined for one of the telemarketer's ACDs may query a central database to determine the current state of traffic congestion for a plurality of the telemarketer's ACDs and--based on that information--direct the call to an alternate ACD when warranted. This method does not consider the traffic conditions within the PSTN, nor the fact that call handling capabilities may vary among locations receiving calls.
Additional automation may be introduced into the processes described above by programming each of the ACDs to determine if its existing capacity threshold is exceeded. If the capacity threshold is exceeded, the affected ACD queries a first "overflow" ACD via an interflow trunk to determine if it can accept the call without exceeding its threshold. If the threshold is not exceeded, the "overflow" ACD will accept the call. If the ACD threshold will be exceeded, the next overflow ACD is queried via another interflow transfer, and the process of call acceptance or additional ACD queries is repeated until the call is ultimately accepted by an ACD, is blocked, or the calling party disconnects. This solution is undesirable because of the expense of required interflow trunks and the general inability of the method to address call congestion at any ACD on a campaign-by-campaign basis.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,788,718 issued to S. D. McNabb and R. S. Yien on Nov. 29, 1988, describes a method and network arrangement for compiling PSTN traffic analysis data for an 800 telephone service, based on call data collected through a common channel signaling (CCS) network. The objective of the McNabb method is to contemporaneously reduce total call blocking to multiple TCs having specialized call handling capabilities that may differ among locations receiving calls. This approach to load balancing relies exclusively on the telemarketer's knowledge of 800 service call volume for a single 800 number and does not consider ACD performance data or any other information that may be obtained from the telemarketer's premises.
The prior art makes no provision for the continuous use of combined data obtained from both PSTN and telemarketer complex sources to balance service levels and reduce call blocking or to enhance call load balancing among a plurality of ACDs. The prior art, by focusing on call blocking at one of a plurality of ACDs, has failed to address the telemarketer's information needs that facilitate business decisions. These needs include the ability to ensure that desired levels of service will be maintained for a plurality of telemarketing campaigns that are supported by a plurality of splits at a plurality of TCs.